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-   -   Some features that keep me from buying (http://forums.omnigroup.com/showthread.php?t=1724)

WebJIVE 2006-09-19 06:05 AM

Some features that keep me from buying
 
OW is a great browser but, there are a few things that hold me back from buying it. I can list them out and I know there are workarounds for almost all of them and I, like a lot of people don't want to manage 2 or more apps to do some of these tasks that can be accomplished in Safari or Firefox. Just my idea of the ideal OW browser. (BTW, I personally like native OSX apps which is why I don't run Firefox as my primary browser. It doesn't look, feel or operate like a native app)

I think 1 and 2 are my priorities. 3 and 4 are icing on the cake IMHO.

1. Built in RSS reader, not the headline listing built into the bookmarks manager. Safari has what I consider the baseline/usable RSS news reader. I'm hooked on it. If you could just match Safari's functionality, I think you would hit the mark for a large percentage of people. The power user will continue to use more robust RSS readers but good enough is what 95% of the users are really wanting. Also, the site watch feature rocks and should stay IMHO.

2. Either beef up the ad blocking or enable OW to use Safari Block (my favorite because it has excellent Flash ad blocking capabilities) or Pithhelmet. If the cost of developing this further to at least match Safari Block is not worth it, support it as a plugin. Problem solved.. :-) The Flash ads are causing the most pain these days and providing people a list of blockable elements in the site preferences is asking people to become sudo web devs. I develop sites for a living and I hate having to dig through elements to find the right thing to block.

3. For the web devs out there, supporting plugins like Webdev additions for Safari or building equivalent functionality would be icing on the cake. I can get this now with the Web Developer Additions v. 1.0b18.1 by Les Nie bolted onto Safari. Firefox also has a very robust addon for this.

4. SIMBL plugin support. This would add a lot of addon capabilities to OW and open the door for 3rd party developers. If not SIMBL, then open OW up to plugins via an SDK or something. This would allow the 1000's of devs out there to get creative.

Regards,
Eric Caldwell

zottel 2006-09-24 12:57 PM

[QUOTE=WebJIVE]1. Built in RSS reader, not the headline listing built into the bookmarks manager. Safari has what I consider the baseline/usable RSS news reader. I'm hooked on it. If you could just match Safari's functionality, I think you would hit the mark for a large percentage of people. The power user will continue to use more robust RSS readers but good enough is what 95% of the users are really wanting. Also, the site watch feature rocks and should stay IMHO.[/QUOTE]

Well, there are different opinions on that out there. Many people, as you do, opt for an implentation like Safari's, many others, like me, think the current implentation is just perfect for their needs and find the Safari way terrible. (See the threads on this subject.) The perfect solution, of course, would be to have both ways and a config option (maybe even per feed) to choose.

[QUOTE=WebJive]2. Either beef up the ad blocking or enable OW to use Safari Block (my favorite because it has excellent Flash ad blocking capabilities) or Pithhelmet. If the cost of developing this further to at least match Safari Block is not worth it, support it as a plugin. Problem solved.. :-) The Flash ads are causing the most pain these days and providing people a list of blockable elements in the site preferences is asking people to become sudo web devs. I develop sites for a living and I hate having to dig through elements to find the right thing to block.[/QUOTE]

Well, you [i]can[/i] just right-click on an element and choose to block it—but that will block only that particular element. You can then, of course, go to your blocking list and extend the automatically created item in a way that will block similar items. Ok, agreed—that's not really the easy way. I'd vote for an implementation like in Opera, where choosing an element to block presents a line for the blocked URLs list that can be edited before it actually is added to the list.

Personally, I don't ever use the feature to automatically add lines to the blocking list. I [i]love[/i] the fact that OW can use regular expressions for ad blocking, not just glob patterns like all the other browsers—it's just far more powerful. I thought up a few patterns, and they match virtually every ad I encounter. But again, this is not the easy way. To use all the power of OW's ad blocking engine, the user must be familiar with regular expressions, which most aren't. OTOH, to drop regular expressions in favor of glob patterns would mean to extremely cripple a really great feature, just for ease of use, which I personally would extremely dislike. ;-)

So: A nice interface for the feature would be great, e.g. the one described above, perferably with some short explanation of regular expressions directly shown above the editable line. (Like: "Any char, zero or more times: .* Any char, exactly one time: . Be sure to escape '.'s! ('.' -> '\.')")

About plugins: The Omni Guys can't do much for that. For most of the plugins, it's the plugin authors that have to support OW, not the other way round.

Especially for Safari plugins: As far as I understand it (correct me if I'm wrong), any application written in Objective C (the standard C derivate used for OS X) can be extended by plugins. Those plugins can change much of the behaviour of that application, but they will also work _only_ with that particular application, as they exactly have to "say" what feature of the app should be replaced by methods in the plugin. That means: If Safari plugins use that ObjC feature, not a special plugin architecture (like the one Firefox uses), they can only work with Safari.

More general plugins (i.e. those that don't change the behavior of the app itself, but only display stuff), like the Schubert PDF plugin or the Flash plugin already work with both Safari and OW.

[QUOTE=WebJive]4. SIMBL plugin support. This would add a lot of addon capabilities to OW and open the door for 3rd party developers. If not SIMBL, then open OW up to plugins via an SDK or something. This would allow the 1000's of devs out there to get creative.[/QUOTE]

I don't know SIMBL—what plugin architecture is that?

And, as stated above: AFAIK OW [i]is[/i] already open for writing plugins, just by the fact that it's written in ObjC. (Again: Correct me if I'm wrong.)


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